92 York, the cost is three hundred and fifty dollars, or about seven dollars an hour- pricier than a movie (with less comfort- able seats), cheaper than private-school tuition (more comfortable seats), about the same as an Off-Off Broadway show (equal seat comfort). When I called to register, I had to give a credit-card number, describe an "issue" I wanted to resolve, and listen for half an hour as the Landmark order taker recited boilerplate-medical caveats, psychologi- cal warnings, legal indemnities. I shouldn't come, she said, if I were "unwilling to en- counter enthusiasm.. . fear, empathy; sad- ness, or regret" in myself or others, or if coming to grips "with what it means to be human" might prove too "difficult and unsettling" I had to tell her whether my wife approved of my attending the forum. I had to confess whether I had ever quit therapy against a therapist's recommen- dation. Finally, regarding "any issue or claim" I might subsequently wish to :file against Landmark, I had to be prepared to agree to ":&eely giving up my right to a jury or court trial." E ACH forum consists of between a hun- dred and a hundred and fifty people and is conducted in New York every two weeks in a big, tatty third-floor room off Fifth Avenue. It's like a marathon version of certain first-year law- or business-school classes--a lecture course where the teachers are gregarious dictators and classroom par- ticipation is expected. Sometimes it's a mat- ter of anonymously shouting answers to the leaders' fill-in-the-blank exegeses ("You get annoyed with your parents because you want. . . what?"), but people also stand, give their names, and "share" relevant personal anecdotes, "Oprah" -style. There are short breaks every two or three hours, during which the leaders are available to answer questions privatel Jerry, the more electric of my two forum leaders-imagine Martin Short doing Stuart Smalley live-gave us a capsule history, naming Erhard as the organization's founder. Jerry also said that he had "been doing this since 1975," suggesting a certain unashamed continuity between est and Landmark. Yet when a young woman went to one of the microphones to declare her qualms about Erhard and her fear that h .c " " J t e lorum was a con game, erry replied, "Who conned you when you were young? This is about that." When Jerry eXplained a point to the group, he habitually said "Capeesh?" He also re- peatedly mentioned that he was a for- mer professional dancer and that he had recently fathered a darling son. A central forum idea is that people cling unnecessarily to dissatisfactions in order to make themselves feel morally su- perior-what the forum calls "running rackets." The leaders spoke constantly of "causing possibility" and of "being your own life's cause." A piece of paper taped to a table reminded the staff that its goal was to make us all "audacious, self-ex- pressed leaders." The words "sharing" and "listening" were nouns. Everyone used "empower" a lot. The goal was not happi- ness, exactly; but something more sci-fi neutral: "the result," which involves a kind of existential "completion." It's easy to make fun of any freeze- dried patois, but this clunky new language is the means by which Landmark pur- ports to reëngineer its followers' lives. Landmark employs "a language structure that creates possibility;" Jerry said. "You make the interpretations. Rewrite them." There is a Landmark graduate seminar that is actually called "Inventing Oneself" The basic idea is that if you accept Land- mark's epistemological conventions- scrupulously distinguishing, for instance, between facts (e.g., "She didn't call") and THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 20 & 27, 1997 invIdious interpretations of facts (e.g., "She didn't call because she hates me")- and then start using its particular tough- love vocabulary; your life will improve. It's as if an Up with People troupe had for- saken Scripture in favor of Derrida: de- construction as an American applied sci- ence of cheerfulness-happy and unhappy are mere linguistic constructs, and it's up to you to assert control. But even thoughJenywas slightly terri- fYing and ridiculous, even though I reflex- ively loathe almost everything about the Landmark Forum (the jargon, the big classrooms with fluorescent lights, the one- size-fits-all feel-good doctrines, the talking to strangers about my inner life), and even though I dropped out after the first day; I found that I mostly agree with its precepts: that contentment lies within oneself; that the glass is halffùll; that it's pointless to be- labor the past; that whining is bad. "We just made this up," Jerry told us when someone wanted religious ærtaint)r. "This is not the truth." Brian, our other leader, added, with a note of irony, "There are places you can go for truth." If I were going to start my own cult (and I am in no way implying that the Landmark Education Corporation or any of its employees consti- tute a "cult"), it would probably be a lot like this. But I don't think I'd hire Je -KURT ANDERSEN AR.CHITECTUR.E A ROOM WITH A VIEW The prlson of the future will have all the comjòrts of home-except a door. F IRST, it was offices that were going to be rendered obsolete by tech- nology (remember telecommut- ing?). Then, thanks to the Internet, it was going to be libraries. Then, because QVC was certaIn to ful:fill all our hearts' desires, it was going to be stores. But none of this has quite happened the way it was supposed to, for the simple reason that, given a choice, most people would rather engage in some form of actual so- cial exchange, whether it is at the office or at the mall. But what about a build- ing type whose users do not have the luxury of choice? Prison inmates, un- .,,- \. /- >... ^ like customers of the Gap, have to go where they are told. And if they are told that technology has made prisons obsolete, has made it not only possible "- but desirable for them to be incarcer- ated at home-their every movement monitored by the latest in electronic- surveillance gadgetry-then incarcer- ð ated at home they will be. No virtual prison exists yet, but Da- vid Ziskind, a partner at STV/Silver & Ziskind, a New York-based architecture a::: firm that has been designing prisons since the late sixties, believes it IS not too far ofE "Electronic monitors that not